UFO: Does it add up?

UFO is a new dramatic feature that stars Alex Sharp, Gillian Anderson ( The X Files), Ella Purnell, and David Strathairn.

Derek (played by Sharp) is a brilliant college student with a gift for math. He learns of an incident involving a UFO sighting at a local airport and his mind starts racing as he uses his math skills to get the answers. He soon discovers discrepancies in the circumstance sourndinng the sighting and what the eyewitnesses have reported compared to the hurried everchanging explanation from government officials. With help from his friends and his professor, Derek sets out on a quest to solve this mystery.

UFO is around ninety-minutes and is a well-paced movie that moved the story pretty rapidly. The fact that special effects were held to a bare minimum in a movie titled UFO tells me more about the story execution, and how it was able to keep my interest.

Alex Sharp was excellent as Derek, whom you get insight on his personality and compulsions early on in the film through a brief interaction between him and his math professor Dr. Hendricks played by Gillian Anderson.

David Strathairn gives a strong performance as Franklin Ahls, the government official who is juggling the tasks of finding answers and maintaining information control.

If you hate math or at least are intimidated by it, then you might have some apprehension watching this movie because there is a ton of it. Personally, my math skills don’t go farther than basic geometry, so advance calculus and linear algebra equations would go over my head. However, the math didn’t lose me, I was able to understand how Derek came to his conclusions, and that was one of the main reasons why I really liked this film. It was interesting watching him use his math prowess to investigate the incident at the airport.

UFO touches on elements from current science discussion topics regarding the existence of alien life and space travel, like the Kardashev scale of levels of civilization advancement, and Drake equation regarding the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations.

My assessment of UFO is that it is about the journey of two men, a highly curious college student and an experienced government official as they chose to search for the answers to the incident at the airport. UFO is a well-made low budget film that relies on an interesting story and compelling characters, not Hollywood special effects.

UFO was released on September 4, 2018 is available via iTunes, YouTube Premium and Amazon